Energy Startups Cite Collaboration, Govt. Funding to Fulfill Promise

When presidential candidates espouse the need for new energy sources, they often recite a list of possibilities. But not all energy sources are created equal -- solar is different from wind power is different from an electric car, and there are many different ways to harness each one. To help us separate fact from fiction, the Popular MechanicsBreakthrough Conference convened a panel of five engineers working on the most creative and promising of these sources to tell a packed audience of geniuses about the next five years for energy.

Making clean, alternative energy competitive with fossil fuels in the next five years is going to be a challenge. But it's one that Popular Mechanics's award-winning Breakthrough Conference panelists agreed this afternoon that the world can take on by boosting efficiency--and agreeing not to reinvent the wheel while doing it.

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Making any kind of cleaner alternative energy become really competitive with fossil fuels in the next five years will take radical new ideas, but it also means not reinventing anything that doesn't need to be reinvented, a panel of energy experts said at the third session of Popular Mechanics' Breakthrough conference held today in New York. Bruce Osborn, CEO of Stirling Energy Systems; Charles Andraka, who just created the solar dish with the highest conversion efficiency ever; Lonnie Johnson, the Super Soaker inventor who's working on converting heat to electricity; Kinkead Reiling, a synthetic biofuels expert, and Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors all told the audience where they see energy going in the next five years.

In the case of solar power, according to Bruce Osborn, CEO of Stirling Engergy Systems, some of the innovation is already in place. His company is building two huge instillations in Southern California capable of powering more than a million homes. But, he said, the key to bringing down the cost so that solar power is competitive with fossil fuels is to make the rest of the process cheaper. Rather than expensive polysilicon photovoltaic cells, he said, Stirling used steel and glass for his system, which work in a process that converts heat into electricity. Those steel and glass parts can be mass-produced assembly-line style, which is fitting for Osborn, who used to work at Ford Motor Company.

The technology is also already there for some elements of electric cars, according to Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors. His company created its Typ-1e, a three-wheeled electric car capable of driving 120 miles on an 8-hour charge, drawing stares wherever it goes with its futuristic design. Fambro said his cars started an a hobby--"an intellectual curiosity gone awry, because I didn't have a child at the time." But while his wild-looking design is intended to cut down wind drag, Fambro said his work progressed faster than he anticipated because there's no need to reinvent dashboard panels or other interior components of a car. Start-up energy companies often get an attitude that they're going it alone, against the establishment, he said. But while people like to knock Detroit, Fambro said, the established automakers are awfully good at churning out reliable cars at a fast pace.

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Lonnie Johnson, the Super Soaker inventor who's making big moves with solar power, said another key component to advancing alternative energy is collaboration. Johnson created the J-TEC system--a heat engine with no moving parts that depends solely on temperature gradient. His system has a similar function to Stirling's; its 31.25 percent heat-to-energy conversion broke a 20-year-old record for solar--hopefully someday they'll "upgrade" to his system, Johnson joked. But while the 100-patent-plus inventor said that, at first, he and others have been suspicious of sharing with their competitors, collaborative innovation could drastically expand the market for alternative energies. And if the pie gets bigger, Johnson said, that creates more business for everyone involved. "I'm looking forward to working with the Stirling folks and others in the solar business," said Johnson, adding, with a smile, that he still aimed to increase solar efficiency by 50 or even 100 percent.

Because today's panel was looking to the short-term future--the next five years--existing infrastructure is key. People were excited by biofuels because they work with our current engines, insisted Amyris diesel guru Kinkead Reading. Public perception has changed, he said: "Biofuels were the savior for a while, and they became kind of the devil." But Reiling's research has taken biofuels beyond simply growing and harvesting plants to turn into fuel, which has created some of the problems that have given biofuels--especially ethanol--something of a bad name. Amyris Biotechnologies began in 2003 to research a cure for malaria by causing bacteria to synthesize an otherwise hard to find drug called Artemisinin that fights the disease. Reiling and his colleagues then turned to energy, engineering microorganisms to create synthetic biofuels. A little genetic tweak, he said, and you can make microorganisms do amazing things.

One thing today's panelists agreed on is that while many new energy technologies have seemed to be perpetually five years away, some of these are now within reach of being competitve. Sandia National Laboratories solar expert Charles E. Andraka, who created the mega-efficent Stirling dish, said that what matters is how badly people want to implement those technologies themselves. The government experimented with solar during the 1970s energy crisis, but after that, "it was a small boutique project," he said. Andraka assured a packed audience at the Hearst Tower that with some government investment, things can happen fast, and that the funding will probably come soon enough. Nobody knows for sure what will happen with oil prices, Osborn said, but even if fossil fuels prices don't rise precipitously in the next five years, the global warming and national security sides of the energy issue aren't going away, and so neither will the public desire for new, clean energy. "It's diversified," Andraka said. "It's not a single issue."

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